Bloodsong

by Melvin Burgess

  But the other clones, of Gudrun, Gunar, and Hogni, those she does not touch. See, Grimhild, there is hope—not all is lost. She does not want to take anything of them with her. Even the spirits of those silent ghosts Bryony will not tolerate in Hel.

  Outside the day is already warming up when she comes back to where her captive lies and looks down at her. Grimhild whines and cringes. Is this it? The end? No. Bryony has no desire to pollute the loving place where she and Sigurd are about to journey with the likes of her. She takes Grimhild up to the surface, tiptoes up to her room, sliding quietly past the kitchen where the Niberlins are already at breakfast. Carefully she ties the little dog up with parcel tape—mouth, legs, and over the eyes.

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to kill them. I’ve had enough of them in life,” Bryony promises. She locks her captive in the wardrobe and holds a finger to her mouth. “So long as you stay quiet.”

  The job done, she goes to stand at the window. She is tired, she could sleep for a thousand years, but she has sworn that her next sleep will be the one that never ends.

  They came upon him in the garden, Gunar, Hogni, and a loyal guard. The brothers did not want his blood on their hands. Sigurd was sitting on a low wall to one side of the pond. It was teeming with tadpoles and water insects, newts hanging in the water like miniature submarines, thick with weeds and flowering rushes. Sigurd stared into its depths. It was lovely.

  They did not try to hide how serious this was.

  “Sigurd,” said Hogni. “We need to talk.”

  He turned with a little sigh. He felt hopeful. Perhaps they were going to tease his troubles out of him, break his secrets free. Things had changed, now they were changing again. He needed to talk. He nodded. Hogni turned and led the way down the garden along the stream that led from the lake down to the river. The water chatted and giggled over the stones. Behind Sigurd’s back, the guard lifted his weapon silently to his shoulder and took aim.

  “We’ve been speaking to Bryony,” said Hogni. Sigurd nodded, his eyes to the ground, the water in his ears.

  “She told you?” said Sigurd.

  “Told us what?”

  The guard opened fire at twenty rounds a second. He hit Sigurd exactly between the shoulder blades. A plume of blood spurted into the air, bright with life. Sigurd fell; the assassin followed him down with the gun—twenty rounds a second, the appalling clatter of gunfire echoing off the walls of the house. As he fell, Sigurd twisted round so that the guard had to walk sideways to follow through into the wound. As his hand touched the ground, Sigurd found a small branch lying in the grass. He flicked his wrist, sent it spinning through the air so fast it was a blur. It struck the guard directly in his eye, pierced it, smashed the socket, passed through the brain, and thudded on the back of the skull, denting it from the inside. The man fell to the ground, dead before he hit it.

  Sigurd lay there, half twisted round on his front with one arm underneath him. The blood had stopped pumping and was barely oozing now in a darkening pool around him. Gunar looked over to Hogni, who stared appalled at what they had done.

  At their feet Sigurd squirmed. In a sluggish movement he put his hands on either side of his body as if he would push himself up. Gunar and Hogni looked on in horror. It was so unreasonable, so sickening that he was still alive. This was just a final reaction of the nerves, surely? They wanted this to stop, now, for it to be over. They were good, they wanted no pain, no knowledge for him of what they’d done. Please, god, let it be quick! But Sigurd began slowly to climb to his feet. His movements were already speeding up.

  Neither man was armed. The dead guard’s gun lay two meters from Gunar.

  Sigurd laughed weakly. He put his hands on his knees and bent over, supporting himself as he regained his strength.

  “Two hearts!” shouted Gunar. “Like the dragon—he has two hearts.”

  Sigurd wheezed and shook his head. “I don’t need a heart, Gunar,” he said. He laughed. “Look, Hogni, look, Gunar! You thought you could kill me, but I don’t even need to breathe!” He shook his head weakly from side to side and laughed. Gunar and Hogni stared, terrified. What was he? Nothing human, surely. Quickly, without thinking, they followed the training they’d had since childhood and separated, one on each side of him, to get him surrounded.

  Sigurd hiccuped. He raised his head, smiled, and nodded, then turned to face Hogni.

  “You first?” he said. And he opened his arms as if to embrace him. Hogni took a small step back, but Sigurd took a step after him, so quick, so vital and responsive, that Hogni knew he could never escape. Against his will, his eyes drifted behind Sigurd, to where Gunar was crouching down, silently lifting the gun with shaking fingers. He was no soldier, it was obvious to anyone what he was doing, but Sigurd did not turn. He smiled at Hogni and shook his head as if to say, Whatever next!

  He knows, thought Hogni. Maybe he’d known all along. His eyes filled with tears. It was too late now.

  “Don’t cry, Hogni,” said Sigurd gently. “Don’t do this and then cry.”

  Behind him Gunar lifted the weapon. Sigurd’s head twitched slightly to the side.

  “Oh, Gunar, this was badly done,” he said. Gunar fired. Down went Sigurd. Gunar did as the guard had done, followed him to the ground, but his aim was poor and half the bullets ricocheted off Sigurd’s skin. Hogni ran across and seized the gun off him. He went to the fallen man and, kneeling over him, forced the muzzle into the wound in his back. He held the trigger steadily down and fired, twenty rounds a second, twisting the barrel this way and that, from side to side and up and down. Sigurd jerked and twisted. The bullets were passing through his flesh and striking his skin—you could see them battering it from the inside. Sigurd’s face began to lose its features, his limbs their structure as the body filled with a pulp of bones, blood and flesh.

  When Hogni had done, he dropped the gun and fumbled in his pocket. He took out a small device, no bigger than a large marble. Bending over the body, his face a pale sheet, still unable to believe that they could get away with this, he put the device through the hole in Sigurd’s back. With the barrel of the gun he pushed it as far he could, deep into the body. Then he and Gunar ran fast into the house.

  Meanwhile the gun’s voice had been heard. Gudrun, who knew nothing of this plot, had been locked in her room, but had managed to climb out. As they went in, she ran past them. They had to turn and catch her, drag her inside between them, screaming and kicking, begging and weeping, striking out at them. She wriggled free; they doubled back, caught hold of her, dived through a doorway.

  Sigurd exploded. The contents of his skin erupted out of the hole in his back ten meters into the air, a red plume of blood. The skin vanished from the grass. In the dying rumble of sound that followed, drifting into quietness, it reappeared above them, drifting to the ground through the disturbed air. Then, as silence fell, the air began to turn pink. It was a rain of tiny droplets, a mist of blood falling from the sky. Shaking her captors free, Gudrun ran out into the open, held out her hands, raised her face, and stood there, letting him soak into her. Slowly she turned red with blood.

  The mist fell, all that was left of Sigurd. He was eighteen years old.

  Out of the house now stepped Bryony. The plot was almost worked through. Before any of them could move she joined Gudrun in the blood-mist and opened her coat. Around her waist she had strapped explosives.

  “It’s what you think,” she assured them. “If you want to live, run.”

  She gave them time to seize Gudrun and disappear behind the first trees before she pressed the transmitter on her wrist and went to join her lover forever.

  Here’s a peek at Sara’s Face

  A timely new tale by Melvin Burgess

  Just about everyone knows the story of Jonathon Heat and Sara Carter. It’s common currency, revealed to us through a thousand newspaper headlines, magazine articles, news bulletins, TV shows, and an endless commentary on the radio. Heat’s sheer celebrity is one f
actor that made the story of such universal interest; while he still had one, his was perhaps the most famous face on the planet. We’ve been hearing about him for years but the strange nature of his crimes and his terrible fate have made this particular story his most lasting legacy to us.

  Sara is different. She comes down to us as a mystery, a figure without explanation. Her refusal or inability to speak have led to endless speculation about her, but the story of her hopes and dreams and her role in the terrible way they were fulfilled, remains elusive. How much did she plan? Was she in control the whole time, or was she just the innocent victim of Heat and his surgeon, Wayland Kaye? It’s the purpose of this book to try and cast some light on the girl herself.

  As someone used to trying to create an impression of truth, investigating actual truth has proved to be a tricky affair. Both Heat and Sara seem to have been master dissemblers themselves, with only very shaky ideas of who they really were or what they wanted to become. Heat, of course, is in prison. Sara’s fate is more open to speculation. Since her failure to come and give evidence in court, rumors have circulated widely; madness or death, or the terrible nature of her injuries seem to be the most likely options, but to this day, no one is really sure. I’m a novelist doing a journalist’s job, and my brief has been to get at what people thought and felt, and what their motivations were, as much as simply to describe the unfolding of events. What goes on in people’s hearts is a notoriously tricky thing to know. I’ve done my best to understand rather than speculate, but frankly I’ve been amazed at how little positive truth you come across after even the most thorough investigation. Everything that happens is filtered through opinion and memory, and of course by how much other people want you to know. No two people remember anything in exactly the same way. I’ve done my best to verify everything before I came to write it. Most of all, I’ve done my best to be true to Sara.

  I’ve been able to speak to almost all the people involved in the events that took place in Cheshire in 2005, except of course the two main protagonists. Even with all the contacts in my hand, Sara has proved to be incredibly elusive. She told so many different versions of what was going on to so many different people, it’s as if she has done her best to extinguish her real self in favor of her own legend. Perhaps that’s the nature of her tragedy. Like a religious figure or a character from myth, it’s nothing she ever said or did but her story itself that forces her on our attention and inspires our imagination. In that sense, she more than achieved her ambition of making fame itself a work of art.

  • • •

  Sara seems to have been a very popular girl while she was at primary school and stayed that way for the first couple of years at high school. After that her popularity wavered. Some people thought she was just plain weird, others that her behavior was put on for effect. Either way, she was too strong a taste for many of her contemporaries, but those who did love her loved her dearly and were loved in return. Even when she rose above them, she never forgot who her friends were, or what friendship meant to her.

  Sara and Janet Calley met each other in their first year at high school and that was it—they were friends for life. For a couple of years they did everything together, ran around the corridors giggling at the same jokes, read the same books, sometimes even wore the same clothes. Anyone who saw them would have thought of them as two peas in a pod, but Janet already knew that Sara was altogether different. When, in Year 9, Sara suddenly turned into a different person, Janet wasn’t in the least bit surprised.

  Sara shot up. In a few months she put on over thirty centimeters. Her figure, which seemed to have been holding puberty at bay so far, suddenly bloomed. After a brief spell of acne her face healed in a few weeks into the clearest skin, without blemish and so finely grained that not a pore was visible to the naked eye. Her flawless skin was one of the things that attracted the attention of Jonathon Heat, who had always had an open complexion.

  At the same time she developed a scent all of her own.

  “I noticed it on her one day,” said Janet, “and I asked her what she was wearing.”

  “Can you smell it too?” she asked. “It’s not anything. I didn’t even wash this morning.”

  They were both astonished by this trick of nature and went to lock themselves in the toilet so they could smell the skin on her arms, her legs, on her back and shoulder, and verify that it was her skin all over. It was true. She smelled all over of salted almonds and musk.

  “She never had to wear deodorant all day after a shower,” said Janet, shaking her head in amazement. “I never came across anything like it. Her own perfume! She used to say she was fed up with it, she’d like to smell of something else, but really, she was very proud to be her own perfume. They could have made a fortune if they ever put it in a bottle.”

  As a result of her height and her looks, Sara suddenly began to attract a great deal of attention from boys, which she suffered with a kind of bemused tolerance, always keeping them at arm’s length. Later, when her face was known across the world, the newspapers tried to make out that she’d slept with a great many of those boys—that she was a sex maniac, almost. Janet always maintained that it wasn’t true.

  “She wasn’t like that at all. In fact she used to have this joke about how she was going to be the last virgin on earth, because she was still holding out when all the rest of us were already at it. But I suppose it’s her own fault. She liked it that people thought that about her. I had to promise not to tell anyone she was a virgin, although actually she was very proud and wanted only to do it with someone special.”

  “It’d be bad for my image if people knew,” she said. In fact Sara was a virgin right up until she met Mark, a little after her seventeenth birthday and, as far as Janet’s aware, she never slept with anyone else.

  When the sexual attention got out of hand, Sara put a stop to it in a way that won a great deal of disapproval from her classmates. It happened like this.

  It had started as a game of chase years before at primary school. The old story—the boys chase the girls and rough them up or put their hands under their clothes. The game had died down at high school, when people didn’t know each other so well, but a small group of boys and girls had started it up again sometime in Year 8. They were good friends, all five of them, and spent time together out of school as well as in it. The three boys would pounce on one of the girls, drag her into the boys’ cloakroom, and have a quick grope with much shrieking and howls of laughter.

  The girls enjoyed it as much as the boys; but there’s a fine line between rough play and bullying, and another again between bullying and sexual assault. It wasn’t quite childish anymore and it wasn’t just chase. Once or twice the boys tried it on someone else and just about got away with it. Their fatal mistake was trying it with Sara.

  Sara was friendly with these boys—not close, just friendly. She was the most desirable girl in the school and it’s a sign that more than fun or curiosity was involved that they tried it on with her. One day, as she was walking with her past the cloakrooms, they pounced, dragged her off out of sight, and rummaged inside her clothes.

  Janet was standing outside with another girl when it happened. She stood and listened to the boys grunting with laughter and Sara’s shrieks of indignity, her heart beating furiously. It wasn’t Sara she was worried about. The boys were going places they weren’t welcome but Sara was in no danger—it wasn’t real violence.

  “They didn’t ought to be doing that,” said the girl next to her. Janet remembers thinking how right she was.

  It was over in a few seconds. The boys came running out, giggling and smirking, and Sara came staggering after them tucking her shirt in. She walked up to Janet, whipped out her mobile phone, and dialed. She stared straight at them as she spoke.

  “Police.”

  The corridor, which had been abuzz a moment before, suddenly froze.

  “I’ve just been sexually assaulted in the boys’ toilets at Stanford High School by a gro
up of three boys. My name’s Sara Carter, I have the boys here. I’m with some friends so it’s safe. There are witnesses. Please send a squad car round as soon as possible.”

  She stabbed the phone and started another call.

  “It was just a laugh,” said one of them.

  “You can’t do that,” said another.

  “She wasn’t even dialing,” said the third.

  She didn’t answer them. “Hello. Can I have the news desk? My name is Sara Carter and I’ve just been sexually assaulted at Stanford High School. The police are on their way. Three boys. Yes. I’m only fourteen years old.”

  “Bollocks,” said Barry. They were all looking really scared.

  “It’s a game, right?” said Joey.

  Then she rang the Head. He was in a meeting at the time, so she spoke to his secretary. “Tell him to get his arse over here, the boys’ toilets near the math block. This is Sara Carter and I’ve just been molested by some pupils from this school. The police and the press are already on their way.”

  She turned off her phone and stared at the boys.

  “Watch me,” she said. She crumpled up her face and began to cry.

  “Oh my God,” said Barry Jones. By the time the Head came running down the corridor with members of staff around him like a herd of rhinos, they knew it was real.

  “It’s them,” said Sara. “They nearly raped me,” she said— which wasn’t true. “They touched me,” she said, which was. Then she burst into tears. Above the shouting and cries of complaint, they could hear the squad car howling in through the school gates.

  And all hell broke loose. The school, the press, the police, everything. The drama was played out in full public view, like so much of her life to come. The boys were arrested as the press cameras flashed; the Head granted a desperate interview while the police overacted for the film crew. The story, as Sara had realized at once, was a beauty. It hit the local TV news that evening and was all over the papers the next day: Gang of teenage boys attempt rape of girl, fourteen, in school toilets. Fabulous!